


Fields of Bone

by xahra99



Series: Monster Ballads [5]
Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, British Character, British English, British Military, British Slang, Gen, Halloween, Trench Warfare, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-27
Updated: 2019-08-27
Packaged: 2020-09-28 03:27:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20419136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xahra99/pseuds/xahra99
Summary: If there were ghosts, Flanders would be fucking full of 'em...Tommy revisits some old ghosts on Halloween. Series four. Gen. Complete





	Fields of Bone

_Warwickshire, 1926_

The sound of shattering glass echoes down the corridor. Frances swallows nervously and pads towards the study. Generations of Arrow House ancestors gaze down at her disapprovingly from their gilded frames as she cautiously opens the door.

It’s one of Mr Shelby’s good nights. He’s still upright and relatively lucid, though his pupils are huge, black holes swallowing a thin ring of pale iris.

One part of Frances’s mind is surprised at how quickly this becomes routine. The remainder is surprised he’s still alive. She opens the door just wide enough to let her through and steps inside. Her sensible shoes crunch on the carpet. Smashed crystal litters the floor like spilt diamonds. The air smells of whisky.

“Hey, Mary,” he says in a voice that’s only slightly slurred. “How’s Charlie?”

“He’s fine,” she says quietly.

He gazes at her, pale eyes wide like he’s seeing something other than herself. Mary shivers. She does not want his attention. He’s dangerous when drunk, though usually to himself. She repeats herself gently. “Charlie’s fine.”

That seems to get through. “Thank you Mary,” he says

“Frances,” she corrects gently. “It’s Frances, Mr Shelby.”

“Frances,” he says.

Frances nods and inches back towards the door. Her soles crunch on glass. Mr Shelby stretches out a hand towards the window. Frances follows his gaze. The curtains are still open, and the window looks out onto velvet blackness. Clouds scud across a sickle moon. A lunar halo predicts a cold night. The gypsy camp is somewhere over in the trees, though Frances can’t see their caravan lights. A branch taps against the window. She jumps. 

“Do you know what night it is?” he asks.

“It’s Hallowe’en. Mr Shelby.”

“All Hallows Eve.” He knocks back a glass of whisky and grimaces like he’s drinking poison. “When the dead walk the earth.”

Frances has seen men drink before, but she’s never seen drinking like this. Shelby drinks with a fierce, joyless tenacity. He doesn’t seem to enjoy it.

“Some say the dead are just like us,” continues Mr Shelby.

“If you say so,” Frances says cautiously.

“And some say they hold a poisonous hate and envy for the living.” He stands awkwardly, propping himself on the table with the hand that isn’t holding the glass. “Do you believe the dead return home?”

Frances clasps her hands behind her back. “Can’t say I do.”

There’s a chipped gilt-edged saucer on the desk, with a pattern of deep red and golden roses. Frances doesn’t recognise the china. Amber drops spatter the table as Mr Shelby fills the saucer. He sits down and leans back in his chair. “Do you think they’ll come?”

Frances thinks it a rhetorical question, but as time passes it becomes clear he’s waiting for her to answer. She inches back another step. “Do you?”

She knows it’s foolish to keep him talking, but it’s very late and he’s very drunk, and she doesn’t know what else to say. She could have dismissed any other employer’s fancies as drunken ravings, but not Shelby. There’s something uncanny about the man. 

Shelby shakes his head. “Not until midnight.”

She glances at the clock, “It’s not midnight yet.”

“Not yet,” he says. “But do you know how we used to pass the time, back in the war?”

She doesn’t know and doesn’t care to ask, but he tells her anyway. ““We’d tell stories. In the trenches. On Hallowe’en.”

“Stories, Mr Shelby?” She takes another step towards the door.

“Nonsense tales of witches, mostly. Angels covering a retreat. Cannibal deserters. A battalion that vanished into mist and were never seen again. But I spoke to a man who swore he’d seen them shot down in Suvla and buried in a mass grave. Have you ever heard of no man’s land, Mary?”

“Some,” Frances says cautiously. She doesn’t bother to correct him.

“Hellish place. Dead men, dead horses. Corpses strung on razor wire. Holes deep enough to drown a man. And there were rumours-”

“Rumours?” she asks despite herself.

“Stories of something worse. Men living underground, like rats. Now some said they were devils that’d hack men to pieces. Some called them angels. Said they saved men from no man’s land and nursed them back to health. And some said they lived there ‘cause they chose to. That one day we’d bury our rifles and head out ourselves.” He draws a lighter from one pocket. “Course, the brass soon put paid to that.”

He lights the whisky. A ring of flickering blue flames leaps towards the ceiling and Frances pauses in her slow retreat to ensure he doesn’t light himself on fire. “Most of those stories were bullshit. That place, though, it did something to your mind. Came to the point you couldn’t dig another grave without skeletons hanging out the walls.”

The flames die down to a flickering eerie glow. Frances relaxes. She glances back towards the door. 

“There was one lad I knew in the trenches. Private Cook. Caught him lagging during a retreat one night. He said he hadn’t eaten, so I passed him some food. Thing is, his hands were cold. Like ice.” He stares out of the window into the night, his blue eyes seeing back miles and years. “Never saw him again. When I caught up with his unit they said he’d died two days before.”

Frances knows the story will haunt her dreams late at night, but it’s not the tale so much as Shelby that makes the hairs rise on the back of her neck. Blue light plays on the shaved hair on the sides of his head, cropped short like he’s still in the trenches. Frances realizes that Mr Shelby never left the war. He’s as much a casualty as those men buried in the French mud.

“I should go,” she says. “Charlie needs checking.”

He doesn’t seem to hear her. A fox screams outside as the blue flames gutter. Frances retreats, heedless of the glass that crunches beneath her shoes. Mr Shelby doesn’t look up.

“One thing I know,” he mumbles. “If there were ghosts Flanders would be fucking full of ‘em.”

He blows out the flames, pours the remaining alcohol messily into a tumbler, and drinks it down.

Frances shuts the door and leaves him to his ghosts.

_“Sometimes I think ‘bout mama with the knife still in her chest_

_Sometimes I think ‘bout all those lucky men I sent to rest_

_And how it’s them a-sleepin’_

_And me who is the ghost_

_Now ground don’t want me mama_

_The ground don’t want me no, no, no._

_What is the body when the soul has flown?_

_Has it only been forgotten?_

_I want to lay down in the field of bone_

_But an angel guards the garden.’ _

-_Ground Don’t Want Me_, Josh Ritter

**Author's Note:**

> A weird ghost story exploring some spooky World War One trench tales set during Tommy’s breakdown at the end of series four. Frances is Tommy’s long-suffering housekeeper in seasons four and five. I love the weird relationship the Shelbys have with their staff during the series; bemused yet strangely caring. I also wanted to explore Polly and Tommy’s opinions on the supernatural-they’re so completely down to earth and simultaneously so eerily fey. This story started out as a fic about the cannibal deserters said to lurk in no man’s land in WW1 until I realised that pretty much the only difference between the cannibal deserters and Tommy’s tunnelling unit was that the deserters ate human flesh. Other weird WW1 tales include the long-debunked myth of the crucified Canadian soldier and the completely fictional WW1 German corpse soap factories (which would have nasty parallels to the Holocaust tales during WW2).


End file.
